Try It at Home!

Some people who describe wine for a living would have you believe that their work involves arcane rituals and secret handshakes known only to insiders. To participate, you need to be able to appreciate in a wine, as one recent commentary from a local merchant suggested, the “fecund aromas of a barnyard in Beaune.”

That may be true if you want to buy expensive Burgundies from this cool cat of a wine seller. But, most of the world of wine appreciation manages to get by simply by knowing how to recognize merde when they smell it. And the key isn’t in the tricky turn of phrase or how one holds the wine glass. We learn to taste the way we learn to do most things in life. Some of us learn by doing, some of us learn by taking courses and reading books, and some of us learn from friends.

And some are like my brother Richard, who will come to my house, drink my best wines with a smile and turn to me and say nothing more than, “Oh, that one was good, Charlie.” What he doesn’t know about wine would fill an encyclopedia.

Richard isn’t much of a wine taster. He is a wine drinker. He would no more take a wine appreciation class than attend a basket-weaving class. Because not being able to tell one fecund aroma from another doesn’t bother him, he is content.

People with more curiosity about wine than my brother ask me about how one becomes a wine taster. My best, most simple answer is that wine tasting is about learning the shared language and generalized standards that experienced tasters use.

The body of language needed to describe a particular wine is somewhat more complex than what might come into play in describing an elephant, but it is not all that much harder to learn. Just as experienced zoo keepers would use words that go beyond gray, long nose, big feet and floppy ears, wine tasters also use a few extra words.

Learning those words and learning the simple steps that wine tasters follow in evaluating their favorite tipple are the not-so-complicated keys to the wine appreciation kingdom.

Wine classes and wine books are good places to start expanding your vocabulary. But I would like to suggest that wine education could also begin at home with nothing more than a couple of glasses, a pen and a notebook.

Join me, if you like, in a tasting of two Zinfandels. Neither is exotic, and both are widely available. Rosenblum Cellars “Vintner’s Cuvee” sells for less than $10 and is one of my all-time favorites for a moderately priced Zin. Chateau Souverain wines are generally pretty good for the money as well. I have paired the 1996 offerings of both.

I look first at the appearance of a wine. With few exceptions these days, most wines are so well-made that they are clear rather than hazy, and bright in color with no browning that might suggest premature aging or shoddy winemaking.

Here, both wines are a nice medium-deep ruby in color. If anything, the Chateau Souverain is a little darker, and that deeper color is a clue that the wine might be a little deeper or riper in character.

The next step is to smell the wines. I hear experienced tasters refer to this as “nosing” the wine. You can drop that little turn of phrase into your next dinner party conversation and one-up the crowd. (Of course, some of us will immediately move to the other end of the table.) Both wines are essentially clean, meaning that there are no discernible off-odors. So, we have learned already that both wines are at least minimally acceptable. You would have no reason to send either back if you got them in a restaurant.

The Souverain seems to be a bit more ripe-smelling. It has more of a dried grape, vaguely berry-jam quality. Try it for yourself and see if you agree. I find the Rosenblum to be what I call “brighter.” It seems to show more youthful fruit even though its nose is neither as rich nor as heavy as the other wine’s. The other thing one might notice is a bit more of a spicy note in the Souverain.

Look also for the oak. Both wines have been aged in oak barrels, but because they are lower on the price scale, the wineries have not aged them long in barrel and have not used their best, newest, most expensive barrels. Oak shows up in a range of smells and flavors, but most common are suggestions of vanilla and sometimes a “toasty” characteristic that comes from the open flame used to heat the wood in order to bend the pieces (staves) of the barrel into shape.

Neither of these wines is especially oaky, but you might find a bit more oak in the Chateau Souverain. And, though we are not tasting one of Souverain’s or Rosenblum’s more expensive “spreads” as part of this exercise, you would find that both of these producers can be absolutely extravagant in their use of oak when it comes to wines that cost more.

The next step is to taste the wines. Since we have already found deeper color and more “ripeness” in the Chateau Souverain, we can guess that it will also go in that direction in the mouth. The key, then, will not be whether it is heavier or fuller in body, but whether it has enough fruit flavors from the grapes, rather than those introduced in winemaking, to accommodate its bigger size--assuming, of course, that we have been right about the clues found in color and aroma.

And it does turn out that the Chateau Souverain is more “full-bodied” than the Rosenblum. But therein lies the rub. Everything about the Souverain seems bigger than the Rosenblum, and that bigness is accompanied by a much more noticeable level of tannic astringency. Whereas the Rosenblum is more “open” and easy to taste, the Souverain is simply less fruity.

The last part of tasting is what we call “finish.” I like the way the Rosenblum ends with its somewhat mild, clean and straightforward fruit intact. The Souverain is drier and coarser, and it shows itself, both across the palate and in its final taste, to be less fruity and less inviting than the Rosenblum.

In this case, it is in the balance of fruit and tannin, of depth and coarseness, that I find the Souverain to be letting down. It is aspiring to be a big wine, but the stuffing just isn’t there. The Rosenblum, for whatever sins it may have, is a pretty simple, direct wine. It was never meant to be more.

I will have taken about five or six minutes with each wine in making my notes and in deciding which I like better. I conclude that both are relatively good wines for the money, which is about all my brother Richard wants to know.

But I also conclude that neither rates a star in the Connoisseurs’ Guide hierarchy. The Rosenblum is about as good as it gets in a widely available Zin for under $10. The Souverain has a front-line price of $11. I will keep both in mind, even as I look elsewhere for tastier wines, often at a higher price, of course.

In the long run, I have three standards to meet when I buy wine--the Mrs. Olken “slurpy” test (which the Rosenblum would win), the brother Richard test (which the Souverain would win because it is the “bigger” wine) and the “wine cellar test” (whether I want to put some of the wine in the cellar for some future event).

You can decide for yourself which test is right for you. You don’t need to know the secret handshake to conduct these tests. You need only a couple of glasses and a notebook.

Oh, and maybe a little learning along the way. Wine evaluation is a bit more complicated than wine drinking, but it is not rocket science.

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Olken publishes the Connoisseurs’ Guide to California Wine, a monthly newsletter devoted to the critical review of California and West Coast wines. Readers of The Times may obtain a sample copy by sending their name and address to: CGCW, P.O. Box V, Alameda CA 94501, by calling or faxing (510) 865-3150 or by e-mailing CGCW@aol.com.